As the country emerges from what we all hope has been the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us will again regularly get to stand in the line we all love to hate: the TSA security check. We all know it’s a friction-filled, long, slow, inefficient process, but have you ever paused to wonder why it’s so bad? The answer is simple: trust — or rather, the lack thereof.

It’s a situation that author Steven M.R. Covey examines in his book The Speed of Trust. In a high-stakes situation like airport security, trust is in short supply. Quite the opposite, in fact! Every traveler is deemed a security risk until proven otherwise. Some 50,000 TSA agents spend millions of staff hours each year manually checking each passenger. The friction is absolutely by design — inefficiencies are baked into TSA’s processes.